We’re not sure why, but there does seem to be an affinity between coffee and driving electric. Starbucks has long offered EV charging at some of its stores, and now the chain, in partnership with Volvo Cars, is planning to install chargers along a 1,350-mile route between the hypercaffeinated cities of Denver and Seattle. By… Read more »
Search Results Found For: "DOE"
World Rallycross racing championship goes electric
EVs have firmly established themselves in the racing world—Formula E has been delivering thrills for eight seasons now, and the more rough-and-tumble Extreme E is midway through its second season. Electric racers, both 4-wheeled and 2-wheeled, have distinguished themselves at the yearly Pikes Peak Hill Climb. Teslas have been shaking up the street racing subculture…. Read more »
Voltera launches turnkey infrastructure solution for automakers and fleets
A new company with a star team and plenty of backing from equity firms has joined the rapidly-growing fleet infrastructure space. Newly-launched Voltera provides EV charging facilities as a service—its turnkey solution includes site identification and acquisition, power procurement, facility design and construction, charging hardware deployment, operations and maintenance. Voltera’s customers include “organizations looking to… Read more »
The promise of wireless charging: smaller batteries, longer battery life, fewer charging stations
Q&A with Momentum Dynamics Wireless charging is nothing new—Charged has covered wireless EV charging since at least 2011—but it may be that its true value is only coming into focus now, as more and more commercial and transit fleets are electrifying. There are many reasons (safety, reliability, liability) that a fleet operator might not want… Read more »
The EV raw materials crunch: How bad, how long, how to solve it?
This article originally appeared in Issue 60: April-June 2022 Subscribe now Every new technology must overcome a series of temporary constraints on its way to widespread adoption. Since modern EVs appeared a decade ago, they’ve motored past many of these bottlenecks, (or hurdles, or roadblocks—pick your preferred metaphor). Range has increased, access to charging infrastructure has expanded,… Read more »
Will the Buy American provisions of the revamped EV tax credit do more harm than good?
Auto industry experts (and others) are beginning to assess the details of the redesigned federal EV tax credit program contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s broad agreement that the changes will help to speed EV adoption, but there’s also concern that some provisions of the law could be counter-productive, at least in the short… Read more »
Ascend Elements to invest a billion in Kentucky battery materials facility
Ascend Elements , a vertically integrated battery recycling and engineered materials company, has announced plans to invest $310 million in the first phase, and up to $1 billion total, to build a battery materials facility at the Commerce Industrial Park II in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The new manufacturing facility, Apex 1, will be home to the… Read more »
A closer look at brushed AC motors in EVs
Everything old is new again: BMW’s fifth-generation eDrive features a wound-field synchronous AC motor Brushed DC (and AC/DC universal) motors are much maligned for a number of reasons, but one of the chief—if, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated—complaints is that the graphite brushes, and the segmented copper commutator they ride on, wear out over time, all the while producing… Read more »
ONE’s hybrid battery pack combines the best aspects of two chemistries to deliver 600 miles of EV range
Q&A with ONE CTO Dr. Steven Kaye. There is a wide range of characteristics that describe the performance of any given battery chemistry: energy density, specific energy, specific power, discharge efficiency, self-discharge rate, cycle life, calendar life, and—not the least important—cost. Some types of Li-ion chemistries are really good in a few characteristics but fall… Read more »
Autonomy to offer up to 20,000 EVs through its subscription service
Autonomy, which offers electric vehicles to customers through a subscription model, has partnered with automotive retailer AutoNation in order to expand its vehicle offerings beyond the Tesla Model 3, and to expand its operations across the US. Over the next 12-18 months, AutoNation will supply Autonomy with up to 20,000 EVs from several automakers. AutoNation… Read more »
